South Korea’s government and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification jointly hosted an inaugural forum this week to discuss how the international community can best cooperate to achieve land degradation neutrality.

Organized by the state-run Korea Forest Service, the Global LDN Forum took place in Seoul on Wednesday and Thursday, inviting officials from environment-focused international organizations, policymakers and academics to discuss ways to strengthen global LDN implementation.

The event came on the heels of developing talks on joint forest restoration projects between North and South Korea, as well as rising concerns in East Asia over yellow dust and air pollution caused by desertification and land degradation in the region. 

Land degradation neutrality is defined by the UN as “a state whereby the amount and quality of land resources, necessary to support ecosystem functions and services and enhance food security, remains stable or increases within specified temporal and spatial scales and ecosystems.”

It is a conceptual framework, adopted by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification and Drought, aimed at halting and reversing land degradation, restoring depleted ecosystems and promoting sustainable resource management.

The idea is also linked to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 15 that aims to achieve the following goals by 2030: combat desertification; restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods; and strive to achieve a LDN world.

To strengthen worldwide efforts to achieve this goal, South Korea and the UNCCD co-organized the Global LDN Forum to highlight the importance of the LDN and its pragmatic implementation.

The starting session on Wednesday focused on “strengthening global partnerships for LDN implementation,” touching on topics such as sustainable funding for LDN, strategies for green growth, restoring of resources near the border region of the Aral Sea, cases of public-private partnerships and cooperation for forest maintenance.

Another session zeroed in on “achieving security and peace through LDN implementation,” introducing success cases such as joint land restoration efforts ongoing in Brazil’s Pantanal and Lake Chad, as well as the “3S Initiative” -- sustainability, stability and security -- that aims to tackled migration and conflict related to natural resource degradation in Africa.

The second part of the forum on Thursday centered on high-level talks on the execution of the Peace Forest Initiative, which involves developing ways to promote peace and security and improve the living conditions of communities in cross-border regions through LDN implementation,

The session kicked off with congratulatory remarks from distinguished officials including Korea Forest Service Minister Kim Jae-hyun, Korea’s second Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Cho Hyun and Global Green Growth Institute President Ban Ki-moon.

Following a keynote speech by UNCCD Executive Secretary Monique Barbut, high-level government officials from countries that have carried out joint LDN implementation projects in cross-border regions -- including Tajikistan, Serbia, Herzegovina, Paraguay, Gambia and Korea -- shared how LDN can play a role in promoting peace in cross-border areas of conflict.

The two-day forum concluded with a visit to the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea, aimed at forging an international consensus on the promise of peacebuilding through the restoration of North Korea’s forest resources.

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com) and Lee Kwon-hyoung (kwonhl@heraldcorp.com)